Fine Art ...And A Family-Size Pizza

Photography is a wide-ranging field that engenders passion in its practitioners,
and like all great forms of expression creates opinions formed through experience
and reflection. In its early days one of the great debates was: Is Photography
Art? This was the subject of many essays and heated discussions among players
and spectators. Today, issues such as film vs. digital, format choices, the
validity of computer-generated images, photography as exploitation or revealer,
and even the merits of inkjet vs. silver prints cause similar debate. We are
opening this department up to readers, manufacturers, and retailers--in
short, everyone who lives and breathes photography and who has an opinion about
anything affecting imaging today.

Here's how to get involved: write us an e-mail at editorial@shutterbug.com
or send us a letter with a proposed topic and a synopsis of your idea. Once
approved, we'll ask you to send us about 500-1000 words on the subject
chosen. The idea here is not to push any product or wave any flag, but to create
discussion about photo and imaging topics of the day. We reserve the right to
edit whatever you send in, although we will never edit intention or opinion
but only for length and, hopefully, for clarity. We reserve the right to publish
your work on our website as well, so you can join the archives and be a resource
for opinion for years to come.

So, get thinking and writing and share your Point of View.--George Schaub

The very basis of fine art is laid bare in something George Bernard Shaw is
reputed to have said to Henry Ford: "Ah, Mr. Ford, there is the difference
between us. You think only of art, and I think only of money."

Whether the story is true or not, it well illustrates the fundamental concern
of any artist in any medium. Shaw was arguably the greatest playwright of his
generation; Ford was unquestionably one of the greatest industrialists. The
price of a theater ticket--indeed, the price of a theater--was nothing
to Ford, and to him, art was the highest ideal. But unless Shaw sold his plays,
he didn't eat.

What is "fine art photography," after all? Reduced to its basics,
it is stuff that people want to have on their walls (or at least, in their collections)
for its own sake, as a picture. In this sense, it is very different from a wedding
album. It is usually different from a portrait, too. Many of us have pictures
of our loved ones on the wall, but are honest enough to admit that if you don't
know the person involved, the pictures don't amount to much. Of course
there are exceptions. Some portraits transcend personality, and become universal:
a picture of every little girl, every tango dancer, every old fisherman.

But this shades all too easily into genre photography. Old Spanish fishermen
mending nets were a staple of the 1950s; Arabs in traditional headgear were
a staple of the '70s; Tibetan monks seem to have been a constant since
the first cameras reached Tibet. A lot of landscape is genre photography, too:
places we'd like to go, places that fulfill a fantasy for us, maybe just
places we've been. There's a difference between "easy on the
eye" and "fine art."

Shop interior. This is a Polaroid sepia, which adds a whole new
dimension to fine art photography, as every image is necessarily
unique (and very small, at 4x5"). ("Sepia" gallery.)

Or is there? If people will buy pictures of kittens in boots, or record shots
of the New York skyline under the setting sun, to say nothing of a girl in a
short tennis dress scratching a well-rounded and panty-less buttock, doesn't
that make them fine art too? If not, what does? And, contrariwise, why would
anyone pay to have a Sebastiao Salgado picture on their wall, or a Brassaï,
or a Cartier-Bresson? These are slices of life, reportage, photojournalism:
how can they be fine art?

This brings us to the central contradiction of fine art, which is best summed
up in an old saying: "Talent does what it can; genius does what it must."

As for my point of view photography is art involving a deep longing of the images you want to create. It involves technique, right gadget, a subject and a photographer to create that perfect picture. - Mallory Fleming